On the heels of the announcement of Megaupload's pending resurrection as Me.ga, Kim Dotcom has come up with a yet another way to promote himself, annoy the US and New Zealand governments, and rally public support in his battle to stop his extradition and end the copyright infringement case against him: he wants to give everyone in New Zealand free broadband service.

The core of the plan is to revive the failed Pacific Fibre, an effort to create a broadband link from Australia and New Zealand directly to the US by way of a submarine cable to Los Angeles. The effort went bankrupt in August before reaching its goal. Dotcom's plan is to complete the link, and to sell high-speed connections to government, businesses and foreign telecommunications companies—while giving New Zealand ISPs free access to provide connectivity for individual residents.

"For every foreign user downloading from NZ (paid)," Dotcom posted on Twitter, "a Kiwi can download from outside NZ (free). The key: Storing data foreign users want in NZ." Dotcom contends that the high-speed link would make New Zealand an attractive location for data centers; the country's current shortage of global connectivity makes it an "Internet backwater," he said.

"It seems kind of insane"

Still, industry watchers say that Dotcom's plan is not without merit, but he may not be the best person to pull it off, as the cable would need to connect to American soil.

“It seems kind of insane to me," Tim Stronge of TeleGeography, told Ars. "Obviously he’s not a favorite of the Department of Justice, and if the whole plan [moves forward], the FCC or the Department of Justice might be unhappy about it."

However, he pointed out that New Zealand, and more importantly Australia (by virtue of having a bigger population), are in great need of more bandwidth.

"We looked at the route awhile back and it makes sense economically," he added. "It’s one of the few routes in the world where i can say that. There’s really strong bandwidth growth from New Zealand and Australia, so we think a cable along that route would be profitable. The problem is that investors are really stingy with their money."

If Dotcom's plan goes forward, users would still have to pay Internet service providers for access under the plan. But with free and faster direct connections overseas, user fees could be reduced to as low as a fifth of the current cost for broadband, with much higher throughput and no data caps.

Completing the trans-Pacific fiber link would require another $400 million in funding. Dotcom says that he would provide some of the funding himself, and work with the founders of Pacific Fibre to raise additional capital. "Not hard to imagine how Investors would like Pacific Fibre if it could charge a single customer 20M per year," Dotcom tweeted.

Show me the money

But it's not clear where Dotcom himself would get money to make an investment. He suggested in an interview with the New Zealand Herald that he could raise some of the funds to relaunch the project through lawsuits against the entertainment industry and the US government over their "illegal destruction" of Megaupload.

Stronge added that even if Dotcom isn't successful, Ozzies and Kiwis shouldn't despair.

"I do think in the next five years there will be a new cable built on this route by someone—it will happen," he said. "It makes too much sense. but the question is which group of investors is going to be able to pull it off and when will it get built?"

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Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat

Indeed! The author better fix that right quick, mate, lest he be pelted with kangaroo turds.

Go to the Wiki page for Ozzie and you find Aussie listed as a "see also"On the Wiki page for Aussie you find:

Quote:

Pronunciation

In Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom, and Ireland, the word is pronounced /ˈɒzi/ OZ-ee (Australian English [ˈɔzi]), with a /z/ sound;[1] however, in the United States and Canada, it is most often pronounced /ˈɔːsi/ AW-see with an /s/ sound.[2][3][4] Pronouncing the word with an /s/ in place of the /z/ is considered by Australians to be a canonically American error[citation needed]—similar to pronouncing the last syllables of Melbourne and Brisbane as "born" and "bane", respectively, rather than with a reduced vowel.

The Ozzie spelling is intended to help us linguistically deficient Yanks

Also Aussies are from Oz which alone should legitimate the Ozzie spelling

Pacific Fibre failed precisely because there *is* sufficient competition and capacity on Pacific transit to Australia now. Unfortunately for New Zealand that means only the Southern Cross cable is viable without routing via Australia. So I'm not sure how this can be commercial in the near future.